A river cuts through rock, not because of its power, but because of its persistence.”
Jim Watkins
I was never a Rhodes Scholar and did not graduate in the top half of high school nor college and was a terrible tire salesman. But from an early age, I enjoyed being outside and climbing trees and scaling water towers, mostly for the views to satisfy my innate nature of questioning everything including the widely held belief that the earth is round. There is nothing that brings one into presence like long, steep steps and a surging heart rate, other than maybe being a solitary reader. After college, I found that seeing the world from a stair scaffolding on a Sawnee EMC power line at 85 feet led me to immerse myself in a monastic study of the world’s highest places, even if I could maybe never get there.
In late January of 94 my Archimedean calculations confirmed that I would never have enough resources to climb high mountains before the age of 60. Not with a BA in economics, for which I remain ever so grateful to my Methodist education and a macro economics professor from Mumbai who insisted upon never repeating himself although he lectured with a thick tongue that would stick out of his mouth whenever he rolled his r’s and used a v where a w went. Although a man of erudition he had an indecipherable cadence which gave me the gift of insight into solitary reading and a quick realization that not only did I need a higher paying gig, but a job where someone would pay me to read and write because other than climbing reading and writing was all I ever wanted to do.
Before every computer on the planet was networked with online classes we had night schools. I found a small law school willing to give a very bad standardized test taker, but a reader of scandalous speed, a chance to certify for a bar exam in a handful of States. I went to school nights and worked days and sometimes both at the same time, mastering civil procedure and constitutional law while running subpoenas, finding lost kids, tracing insurance scams and certifying security guards and private investigators in firearms. I did anything to fund school 26 years ago.
Alas, here I am a simple monk and I can swear under oath as a witness to the sun rise from the top of three different continents and being fortunate to scale Rainier’s Disappointment Clever, the roof of North America, the highest mountain in the western hemisphere and surviving electrical storms on an Ecuadorean volcano, that indeed, the world is splendidly round.
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